On Fentanyl and the Border
Spoiler: tariff threats and other "one weird trick" approaches won't work.
As long-time readers know, my main area of academic focus is comparative democracy with an increasing focus on the United States in a comparative context. But my journey started in Colombia in the 1990s. My dissertation was on constitutional reform and the changes to electoral rules and structures that came about as a result. But one does not live in Bogotá, Colombia in the mid-1990s and study Colombian politics without getting a massive side-helping of drug war as part of the mix.
Indeed, one does not teach Latin American politics and US-Latin American relations in the first couple of decades of the 2000s without talking a lot about drug trafficking (as well as immigration). As such, I have informed views on the border and border security, even if they are not my primary area of expertise.
Such knowledge is why simplistic assertions about “closing” or “sealing” the border always drive me a bit nuts. And, moreover, why even floating the idea that the US would just tariff Mexico and Canada into stopping drug smuggling sounds like claiming that if you paint your house orange hurricanes will spare it.
I will even note that, like many young conservatives growing up in the 1980s, I was pro-drug war at the time. But then, when I learned about not only the devastation visited upon producer countries as well as the fact that the US spent billions of dollars for limited return (the amount of money waster relative to the success rate is staggering), I must confess I changed my mind. I long ago shifted my preferences to a public health/harm reduction approach. But I also acknowledge that drugs cause substantial harm and there are no easy solutions.
One thing is clear: I don’t think you can interdict your way into stopping something like the opioid crisis. One of the grandest ironies of interdiction policies is that they frequently make drug smuggling more profitable, at least at the dealer level, because it affects supply while demand remains constant, which drives up street prices. Interdiction can also incentivize more production because more supply is needed to offset losses due to seizures. The bottom line remains that there is an obscene amount of money to be made because there is a never-ending market full of people who want to get high.
All of this is preface to talking about fentanyl, because one of the things that struck me a while back is how small a dosage is, and therefore the relative compactness of a shipment to be smuggled (as opposed to, say, marijuana back in the day or even cocaine and heroin).
Let’s turn to a Reuter’s piece from back in October: Fast, cheap, and deadly. I recommend the whole piece, as it is well written and full of useful information and graphics.
I will share two of the graphics to illustrate my point about size:
And note that 2 mg is a lethal does. Here’s what that looks like:
As such, getting it across the border is relatively easy and is mostly done via legal border crossings.
Cheap and potent, fentanyl allows a “shotgun” trafficking approach, said Bryce Pardo, research officer at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “Send more couriers with smaller amounts.”
Most fentanyl trafficked by the Sinaloa Cartel crosses at U.S. border ports of entry, often in secret car compartments, disguised among cargo on tractor-trailers, or secreted in the bodies of drug mules, according to an April indictment against the Chapitos, four brothers accused of expanding the Cartel’s fentanyl operations following the capture of their father Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman.
“The Cartel relies on the impossibility of inspecting every item that crosses the U.S.-Mexico border,” the indictment said.
Dozens of recent criminal cases illustrate this strategy. In April, a sniffer dog at the El Paso port of entry alerted authorities to two bundles of blue fentanyl pills concealed within rear quarter panels of a Ford Escape, according to a criminal complaint.
A U.S. citizen walking through Arizona’s Nogales port of entry in June was carrying 740 grams, in small bags taped to her coffee mug, tucked into her bra and inserted in her vaginal cavity, court documents said. A fifth of fentanyl seizures take place on pedestrians, the Reuters analysis shows.
A couple if thoughts. First, all of the seizures mentioned about are via legal crossings. Second, not only are these legal crossings, they are by American citizens. As such, pretending (as Trump and his cohorts do) that stopping illegal immigration is about stopping fentanyl is just wrong. While drugs and illegal border crossings are sometimes linked, they are really two different policy problems.
It should be noted the CBP reports that roughly 4 million pedestrians, over 10 million passenger vehicles, and over 600,000 trucks cross the southern border per month. These are all legal crossings that walls won’t stop and that are part of a vital, intertwined economy.
After a while reading any stories about anti-drug activities feels like deja vu. For example, most stories will talk about increased seizures of product, often citing records. The reporting usually makes it sound like this is a sign of progress. But since we know that even the best seizure regime catches only a fraction of the overall product being smuggled, record seizures mean that record amounts of product are making it through to market. I don’t know how many triumphant stories about record cocaine seizures I have read over the years.
All this chart tells me is that there is one helluva lot of fentanyl making into the US:
It also tells me that heroin smuggling declined not because of successful interdiction, but because a better product, so to speak, was found by the cartels.
All interdiction policies are fighting a losing battle. And the relative size of fentanyl makes it all the more complicated.
Speaking of walls, I can’t help but note that drug cartels in the past have been effective at tunneling under walls and going over them. For example, smugglers have used catapults, drones, and even t-shirt cannons to get drugs over walls and fences. And while I know some immigrants who have crossed illegally have brought drugs, if I were in a cartel, I would rather try and find an American citizen willing to try and walk across a bridge. The chances of the product making it to where I want it to go are much higher. And the odds of successfully getting the drugs past security are actually higher.
As a general matter, the current problem for anti-drug policies has been the significant increase in synthetics versus plant-based drugs.
This is good news for places like Colombia and Bolivia where criminality and political violence has long been driven by fights over land. But it also means that large amounts of drugs can be produced in small spaces, making detection and control of production a major challenge. The best bet that production-side strategies have is to try and control precursor chemicals, which is easier said than done.
So, what’s the point? It is simply and more than a little depressingly: there is no winning the drug war. There are vast amounts of money to be made and people simply like their intoxicants, full stop. We would be better off placing funds into dealing with demand than trying to stop supply because Sisyphus has a better chance of finally getting that rock to stay in place than the US does in actually stopping these illicit flows.
When I say looking at the demand side, I also think that it should be done with more of a public heath/root cause approach that trying to simply punish people. If users are willing to court death for their fix, threats of jail are unlikely to be a significant deterrence.
If we never stopped the flow of cocaine and heroin, how are we going to stop a far smaller product? I would note that the way we stopped marijuana smuggling was to legalize it.
But above all else, this problem is simply not going to be addressed by cracking down on illegal immigration, building walls, or threatening our neighbors with tariffs.
Half a dozen American chem majors could supply the US market working out of bathtubs. No Walter White needed. As you point out, this is not marijuana (bales of) or cocaine (bricks of) you can stuff 10,000 doses of Fentanyl in a condom up your ass. Domestic producers will take over for the imports and there’s no law enforcement fix for that.
Willing buyer, willing seller is an irresistible force. We’d do much better to try and lower demand.
Precisely, stop saving idiot college students with Narcan and give the death penalty to anyone found “selling” a drug that has been doped with fentanyl since they are killing thousands.
George Floyd didn’t knowingly risk death by taking fentanyl. He took several drug products that had been doped with fentanyl to increase the “high”. If you want to sell cocaine, or marijuana, or baby aspirin, or any drug, then you need to make sure your supplier hasn’t doped the supply with fentanyl or you risk the death penalty. That and not saving those who won’t take their drugs responsibly will clear up the problem quickly.
@JKB: The notion that we can punish our way to solving this problem has been definitively shown to be a failed approach.
Your echoing of people like Rodrigo Duterte signals an increasing authoritarianism from you that is unbecoming (to put it mildly).
The policy that the MAGA base cares about is stopping and reversing immigration. To that end, lots of claims are made. Stopping immigration will reduce violent crime. Stopping immigration will increase wages for low-wage positions. Stopping immigration will increase the supply of affordable housing. Stopping immigration will eliminate voter fraud. And of course, stopping immigration will fix the opioid crisis.
@JKB:
Tell me you have no children without telling me you have no children.
Two related bits of trivia from current news.
The Dominican Republic seized 9.5 tonnes of cocaine in a container of bananas destined for Belgium. I expect a lot more drug tonnage arrives in the U. S. at ports and airports than over the land border.
Drug smuggling has been funding the Assad regime.
@Michael Reynolds: From what I read it kills more MAGA voters than college students.
@JKB:
That’s honestly one of the shittiest things I’ve ever seen you post and a great example of how sadly ignorant, vindictive, and retrograde your thinking is.
Important facts: OD’s and death from synthetic opioids like fentanyl are more likely to happen in lower-income and lower-educated communities. People who *didn’t* go to college are at higher risk than college-educated people. Also, typically, men have a higher death/OD rate than women. And lower-income status or being out of work also leads to a higher risk.
While Black folks die at higher rates than White folks, it’s not by much. And because there are so many more White folks than Black, the sheer number of deaths is far greater within the White community.
In other words, it’s the grassroots Trump voter you always talk about who is among the highest risk of death from synthetic opiods. You claim that Democrats ignore the plight of young men, rural voters, and others, but then you turn around an post ugly shit like this.
Likewise, while urban communities have a higher DO/death rate, rural counties don’t run that far behind.
NARCAN availability, like other forms of risk mitigation, is critical to people of all types getting help. Fuck your moralizing victim blaming. Especially given how much you love to play the victim card on so many issues.
Additionally I always find it revealing how people like you who so often post about state abuse of power and prosecutorial overreach are more than happy to give the same state the power to kill people you think “deserve it.”
Who would have guessed you were a “Derek Chauvin” truther.
I’d love to hear how you determine that. Additionally, there remains no evidence that increasing penalties for dealing fentanyl actually impacts the amount of overdose deaths:
https://www.vera.org/news/in-the-fentanyl-crisis-lawmakers-are-making-the-same-mistakes
https://www.networkforphl.org/news-insights/tougher-criminal-penalties-wont-end-overdose-death
Beyond that, way to triple down on the failed drug war tactics that have created many of the social challenges that tearing this country apart.
Sources on over dose statistics: https://www.american.edu/spa/news/upload/research-briefing-1-_kemo-grant.pdf, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db440.htm, https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/overdose-death-disparities/index.html, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7129e2.htm, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319300096
Because getting high can be awesome! But we continue to moralize like JKB. I’d be willing to bet money that a guy like him could seriously benefit from a night out with good people and MDMA.
Look, I get that these are powerful substances and should be treated with respect. But there are, I’m going to guess millions of responsible cocaine users in this country. I’m not one of them though. I’ve never tried coke, but only because I know myself and would be dead by the end of the weekend. It’d be a fun weekend, but I’d still be dead.
All these substances aren’t the same, even though the brain dead moralists claim they are. Psilocybin, LSD, or MDMA are nothing like Opioids broadly or Fent. And why shouldn’t I, an adult, be able to use these substances if I see fit? I would be cheaper to deal with the public health/safety issues of irresponsible users than to continue the War on [some] Drugs.
I get that I’m kind of an outlier in that I hadn’t tried anything other than alcohol and caffeine before my 40s. On the other hand, I watch my younger friends party with me on the weekend and then we all go to our jobs on Monday. My guess is that the vast majority of drug consumers are like us.
One other thing. Who the hell is using all that fentanyl? Where is it going? The people I know and in the scenes I run in, no one goes near it. The only time it comes up is because of cross contamination due to lazy dealers. Is it just White rurals soaking it all up?
@Michael Reynolds: I’d add, “Tell me you think the biggest users are college students without talking to a single ER doctor or paramedic”
@Argon:
100%.
But for some people when you believe that a group you hate is being harmed you are more than happy to sacrifice those you claim to care about for your revenge feel feels.
Also that post fits perfectly into James post from earlier today.
@Matt Bernius: Well said all the way around.
@Matt Bernius:
Straight fire.
@JKB:
This is pure small i ignorance. People who use stimulants or psychedelics aren’t looking to mix fentanyl into what they are taking for a different high. We already know what mixes well and safely (or reasonably safely) for the high we want. People don’t want random dealers mixing random crap. That’s Florida shit.
The other thing is that so many people test their drugs these days. People who don’t want fent, don’t want fent in their coke/molly/K. There are test strips and reagent kits so that we have a better idea of what we are about to consume.
And again, most of the fent in things like C/M/K are there because at some point in the distribution the supplier didn’t clean their work space and now there’s cross contamination.
I also want to add in that responsible MDMA, LSD, and Psilocybin use has made my life SIGNIFICANTLY better. I have severe PTSD from childhood abuse and severe intractable depression. I got bottom surgery because I took MDMA and watched John Summit and realized all the pain I was carrying in my soul. I put it down and had surgery 13 months later. I was able to understand that people actually like me and want me around because I took LSD at an Elrow Party* (google them). I was able to understand that it is ok for me to tell people they are mistreating me and not meeting my needs because I took mushrooms at a different Elrow party. These and other experiences have been profound and beautiful.
*lol, and as an example of how smart and cautious people could be, I smuggled in a sealed pack of skittles into that rave. I was happy and felt loved by my friends. I offered some of the skittles to some people standing next to me. I couldn’t understand their concern and saying no thanks for a bit. Then I realized I hadn’t blinked and was visibly intoxicated. It’s probably a good idea not to accept candy from 6ft tall half naked hot chicks at a party. lol.
@Beth:
Apparently to baby aspirin dealers.
@Michael Reynolds: Hey now!! I don’t have any children, either, but have NEVER opposed Narcan treatment. Don’t be lumping us altogether just because of one obviously cray cray f*%k.
@Matt Bernius:
Me! I would have guessed! It really seems obvious.
Mexico and Canada are ostensibly our partners in maintaining the borders. So there is some connection between those Trump is trying to push and the problems.
It’s more like painting the President orange to decrease the cost of gas and eggs.
Or painting the clouds orange for your hurricane analogy.
Like Canada is dead-set on empowering drug dealers to destroy the youth of of the USA.
ftlog
Also, the “drug dealers adding fentanyl” is just a re-run of the old “heroin in the hash” bollocks.
No dealer is likely to do so, because it adds cost, and they can’t be sure the buyer is going to come back to them.
More likely not, if what they sold was shit.
(“Why, how do do you know such things, JohnSF?”
Well, I was not always Mr Respectable. 😉 )
@Beth:
Hmm, reminds me Spacehopper, Brum, c 2000.
Guess who did accept the candy, lol.
@Gustopher:
Threatening tariff increases will do little to stop American citizens from strapping small amounts of fentanyl to their persons and walking across the border.
Sometime in the early 80’s before AM radio became a cesspool of right wing radio clap trap, KMOX AM out of Saint Louis had a format that included interview and call in shows that actually presented topics thoughtfully and without hysteria.
One of those programs featured an interview with a retired Border Patrol Agent who had worked the southern border dividing the United States and Mexico. He said that even if the United States stationed border guards shoulder to shoulder with fixed bayonets from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico it would not stop migrants from entering the United States. When asked what he did to discourage people from entering the US illegally he said he talked to them and explained the risks involved.